Gamers have been expressing their fatigue with established franchises. They want something new. Well, with The Order: 1886, Sony intends on delivering just that. This PlayStation 4-exclusive – which has been in development for several years – brings gamers to an unusual setting: Victorian England. It’s there that actual history diverges with The Order’s alternate history timeline, melding Industrial Revolution themes with a tale full of, for lack of a better term, monsters.

The Order: 1886 is under development at Ready at Dawn, a Sony-affiliated studio that’s best-known for its stellar work on both of PSP’s God of War games. This is the first time RAD is undertaking such a massive project – one it designed on its own – which does raise some skepticism about its ability to deliver. Then again, everything we’ve been hearing about the game sounds incredibly promising. With the exception of Infamous: Second Son, this third-person shooter may just be PS4’s biggest exclusive of the year.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Exclusive? No. | Release Date: 2014

CD Projekt RED’s Witcher franchise has quickly become one of the most beloved RPG series in the entire industry. The first Witcher game – released only on PC in 2007 – flew under the radar with console gamers, but when its sequel, Assassins of Kings, came to Xbox 360 in addition to PC in 2012, it demanded attention. It created a supplemental buzz for The Witcher that PC gamers had already been heavily contributing to.

Fast-forward a couple of years, and here we are in 2014, with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on the horizon. The Witcher 3 is the first Witcher game that is being designed concurrently for PC and consoles, and will appear on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One later this year. When it finally launches, it will hopefully bring with it the established hallmarks of the series: a huge, immersive world and excellent action-heavy combat, in addition to all of the typical trappings of an RPG.

The Witness

Exclusive? No. | Release Date: 2014

The Witness is being angled as a PlayStation 4-exclusive, but in reality, what appears on PS4 is simply a version of a long-in-development PC game from Jonathan Blow. You may recognize Blow’s name, as he’s the man who helped bring the ingenious game Braid to the world back in 2008. Braid was an incredibly unique and abstract game, and The Witness increases the uniqueness and abstractness, creating something you’ve never quite seen before.

With The Witness, Blow attempts to take one of the most beloved aspects of games today – an open, non-linear world – and puts a different twist on it. Instead of exploring this world, killing enemies with guns or swords, role-playing, undertaking side quests and the like, you solve puzzles. Totally bizarre, often difficult puzzles. If The Witness is one thing, it’s different, and that alone makes us excited to give it a go when it finally launches in 2014.

Thief

Exclusive? No. | Release Date: February 25, 2014

The beloved Thief franchise got its start way back in 1998 when Looking Glass Studios released The Dark Project on PC. Ever since then, Thief has attracted many a player with its slant on stealth mechanics and its unique approach to combat (or, better yet, avoiding combat completely). Unfortunately, the Thief franchise as we knew it fell silent upon the release of Deadly Shadows in 2004. It’s been about a decade since we had a new Thief game, but that’s all about to change.

In the aptly-named Thief – which has been under development since 2009 and was originally called Thief 4 – players are put in the role of Garrett, a master thief who slinks around, committing his crimes in a location known only as The City. Thief gives players choice when it comes to their approach to just about any situation, and it’s this freedom that rests at the center of the game. Slink around silently or slash away: it’s entirely up to you.

Tom Clancy’s The Division

Exclusive? No. | Release Date: 2014

Tom Clancy’s sad passing isn’t going to stop Ubisoft from releasing games under his esteemed moniker. With Tom Clancy’s The Division, which is set for release sometime in 2014 (and may even be pushed to 2015, if recent rumors are any indication), players are cast in the role of an agent of Presidential Directive 51, a super-secret organization unleashed only when the going really gets tough in the United States. And you can rest assured that in The Division, the crap has officially hit the fan.

On Black Friday – the most popular shopping day of the year in the US – a deadly virus was unleashed in New York City, creating a scene of complete chaos in America’s biggest, most populous, and most economically-important city. But the chaos isn’t relegated to only New York, as the US quickly falls prey to the virus, leaving it susceptible to enemy forces, both internal and external. And so Ubisoft’s third-person shooter – which is heavily reliant on online interactivity and connectivity – begins in earnest.

Transistor

Exclusive? No. | Release Date: 2014

Transistor isn’t only the name of 311’s best album; it’s also the name of an eagerly-anticipated upcoming videogame from the minds at Supergiant Games. You may know Supergiant Games best for Bastion, an excellent XBLA and PC action-based role-playing game that won the hearts and minds of many players when it came out in 2011. With Transistor, Supergiant is aiming to follow a similar trend, with an action-RPG toting a strategy slant.

Like Bastion, what you’ll first notice about Transistor is how stunningly beautiful it is. It doesn’t only look great, but it totes a unique aesthetic which truly stands-out in a world full of dark, dire post-apocalypses and future history-based first-person shooters. You’ll also notice that PS4 is the only console Transistor is coming to for the time being, a testament to Sony’s heavily-increased efforts to secure indie exclusives for its hardware, exclusive or otherwise.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War

Exclusive? No. | Release Date: 2014

Several years ago, during the height of the FPS craze, World War II proved to be an overused conflict in the shooter scene. World War I, on the other hand, was seldom visited, not only because it lacked the good-versus-evil slant of “the Nazis versus the World,” but because it just wasn’t that glamorous. It was a brutal, dark conflict full of terrifying trench warfare and barely-moving frontlines. It was, at the end of the day, completely for naught.

And that’s where Valiant Hearts: The Great War comes in, because it dares to tell stories from The Great War (as World War I is sometimes known) without the trappings of a shooter. Indeed, it’s a beautifully-drawn puzzle-based adventure game inspired by actual, totally real letters drafted during WWI. It’s under development at Ubisoft Montpellier – best-known for the Rayman franchise and Beyond Good & Evil – and will launch on a plethora of platforms sometime this year.

War Thunder

Exclusive? No. | Release Date: 2014

If you’re reading this from Europe, then you might be confused, as War Thunder has already launched where you are. But if you’re in North America, you’re still waiting for War Thunder, the ridiculously chaotic MMO game from Gaijin Entertainment. War Thunder takes the idea of total war to the next level, giving players access to anything they could possibly want, from air vehicles, to naval ships, to fighter jets.

The end result is something that’s akin, in some ways, to the cult-hit PlayStation 3 exclusive Warhawk, but on a considerable amount of steroids. And since Gaijin released War Thunder on PC first, PlayStation 4 gamers have been getting (and will hopefully continue to get) a version of the game that has some of its wrinkles ironed out and some of its glitches fixed. Of course, it remains to be seen if this will be a vibrant game over the long run considering it needs a huge community to keep it alive, but we’ll remain optimistic.

In short, Watch Dogs is an open-world action game that takes place in a near-future Chicago, one that’s overrun with interconnectivity and the problems that arise from an always-connected society. Aiden Pearce, the game’s main character, is a hacker who uses his considerable (albeit seedy) skills with connected devices to cause havoc for the powers-that-be. Watch Dogs was already one of the most promising and most-anticipated next-gen games, and that’s before its delay. Now that Ubisoft has given itself time to clean it up a bit, there’s even more of a reason to be excited.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

Exclusive? No. | Release Date: 2014

The history of Wolfenstein is considerable when you consider how much it altered the course of gaming history. When id Software released Wolfenstein 3D on PC back in 1992, it was essentially the original first-person shooter. It’s hard to think of a gaming landscape without the FPS, but over two decades ago, that was the reality of gaming. And then id decided to change it. So the fact that Wolfenstein persists to this day is a nice tribute to gaming’s roots.

Of course, Wolfenstein: The New Order has nothing to do with id. Instead, it’s being developed by MachineGames. As this is the studio’s very first game, it’s unclear whether it’ll be any good or not. But many of the founders and core staff of MachineGames came from Starbreeze, a studio that helped create its own slate of FPSes, including The Darkness, Syndicate, and more. So there’s ample experience there. And with that experience comes promise that MachineGames’ maiden voyage may end up being a great one. We can only hope.